I picked up this cheap screen on Ebay with case and heatsink for $20. I spent hours trying to get this to work. I probably failed at least 30 times before I got this to go. I put this document together to help other people out and help me remember in case I have to go back and reinstall Octoprint. I picked up bits from the internet until I got something to work. The drivers from goodtft and waveshare will crash raspbian buster. The drivers are built into the kernel so you don’t to install the manufacturer drivers.

Step 1.

First of all enable SPI by using the terminal command:


raspi-config


Navigate to ‘Advanced options’ and then enable SPI

Reboot if needed through the command in the terminal:


sudo reboot

The touch screen should turn on and be white colored.

Step 2.


If your still running the Buster beta upgrade to the latest stable kernel

sudo apt-get update –allow-releaseinfo-change

Give the following command to update and upgrade Raspian:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

Step 3.

Now to modify the configuration file to configure the display


sudo nano /boot/config.txt


then add this line to the bottom

dtoverlay=piscreen,speed=16000000,rotate=90


give Ctrl+X, Y, and Enter. (This saves the file)

Give the command:
sudo reboot

Unplug your HDMI cable if you have to plugged in

You now see Linux booting up on the 3.5 inch touch screen.

Step 4.

Log into you Octoprint and install the touch UI plugin. Run the following command to install X and touch screen auto login/boot into touch mode

git clone https://github.com/BillyBlaze/OctoPrint-TouchUI-autostart.git ~/TouchUI-autostart/


sudo ~/TouchUI-autostart/helpers/install

When done

sudo reboot

You should now see Octoprint fire up and go into touch screen mode

Step 5.

At this point your Octoprint should be loaded but your mouse and touch screen will probably be moving backwards. In the newer (Jessi, Buster) versions of Raspbian they change input control from
evdev to libinput. You need to install evdev or it will ignore you
99-calibration.conf configurations.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-evdev

sudo reboot

You can now modify your 99-calibration.conf file

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf

Copy and past below

Section “InputClass”
Identifier “calibration”
MatchProduct “ADS7846 Touchscreen”
# Don’t use libinput but evdev for the touch screen and the pen
Driver “evdev”
Option “Calibration” “3936 227 268 3880”
Option “InvertY” “true”
Option “InvertX” “false”
EndSection

Save and reboot

sudo reboot

Your Raspberry Pi 4 should come up now. Touchscreen should be working in the right direction.

 

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